Installing your Drives
  

 

 
 
This section of the guide looks at installing the hard drive, floppy drive, DVD and CDRW drives. It also cover the remaining items that need assembled inside the case.
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Choosing a processor
Buying a computer motherboard
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buying a computer monitor
buying computer memory
buying a keyboard mouse
buying a cd rom dvd
buying a hard drive
buying a sound card
buying a graphics card
computer cooling
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computer case
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Fitting the floppy and hard drives

Start off with the hard drive. Before you insert your hard drive, there will be a number of jumpers that will have to be configured as master, slave or single, depending on how may hard drives you have. There should be a series of 'drawers' in your computer case for the various drives. First we will install the hard drive. Leave the front blanking plate in place and insert the hard drive according to the case manufacturers instructions. Make sure you take antistatic precautions and also take care with the hard drive, they can be quite fragile. Hard drives can get up to quite a temperature, so be sure when you are fitting your floppy drive to try and leave as much room as possible around you hard drive to allow for air circulation. The floppy also has to protrude through the front of the case, so you will have to remove the blanking plate. Attach both these drives to the motherboard using the appropriate IDE ribbon cable. Hint: The floppy drive will have a twist in the cable (you can see the twist in the picture on the right). Now screw both the drives into place using the screws provided. They screw in from the side.

 

Hard drive and floppy drive fitted into their bays. Note the 34 pin IDE ribbon cable with the twist in the middle coming from the back of the floppy drive.

Fitting the CD RW and DVD drives

DVD and CDRW fitted. Note the power cables (red/black/yellow wires) and the 80 wire IDE ribbon cable without the twist.

 

 The CD and DVD drives come next. Again taking static precautions configure these using the jumpers provided as master or slave. They then fit into the 5.25" bays in much the same way as the other two drives fitted into the 3.5" bays. Again they are connect to the motherboard using the IDE ribbon cable. The connector has 40 pins, the ribbon cable has 80 wires. Connect each drive up to the power supply in turn using some of the wires coming from the power supply loom. The floppy drive will typically use a small power plug, the other drives will typically use the larger, thicker cables.
 

Other connections

There are a number of connections required for leds on the front of the case, power buttons etc. Read the case instructions for your specific case and plug to the respective connections on the motherboard.
 

Finally

Tidy up the inside of you case as much as possible using cable ties. Your case should look as tidy if not tidier than the inside of mine.
 

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